Mike Figgis Research Articles

A imagem-cristal no filme “Timecode”

A fim de verificar se a imagem-cristal se manifesta no filme Timecode (2000), de Mike Figgis, apresentamos as especificidades dessa obra cinematográfica, principalmente em relação à sua montagem; tratamos de montagem espacial, na perspectiva de Manovich (2001); do conceito de imagem-cristal, conforme Deleuze (1990) e, por fim, fazemos uma análise panorâmica de diversas situações em que se estabelecem circuitos cristalinos no filme, detendo-nos em investigar pormenorizadamente três momentos em particular. Entre os resultados, destacamos que as imagens que apresentam um duplo virtual com o qual formam o cristal colocam o espectador como parte integrante dos circuitos cristalinos, pois o indivíduo contribui com suas experiências na combinação linear das múltiplas imagens. Desloca-se, assim, a formação dos cristais tradicionalmente inerentes aos elementos imagéticos e narrativos para a dinâmica da relação entre o filme e o espectador.

Review and Discussion of The Co(te)lette Film

In 2010, English director Mike Figgis presented The Co(te)lette Film, a cinematographic adaptation of eponymous live performance by Dutch choreographer Ann Van den Broek, Co(te)lette (2007). At the beginning of the film, the camera shows three women on all fours at the centre of a large podium. From the very first shots, the viewer is given exquisite high definitions images and close ups of these gorgeous women and their more intimate body parts as they move frenetically and breath heavily. The synopsis of the film states: “There is no confrontation, nor rivalry. No story-telling, no solution and no ending. [The three women] grapple with the meaning and physical translation of beauty and perishability, rawness and fragility. The dancers are slaves of their own desires while trying to get in control of them.”

Screening early modern drama: beyond Shakespeare

Introduction: beyond Shakespeare: the contemporary Jacobean film 1. Derek Jarman's queer contemporary Jacobean aesthetic: Caravaggio and Edward II 2. The preposterous contemporary Jacobean film: Peter Greenaway's Cook, heritage Shakespeare and sexual exploitation in Mike Figgis's Hotel 3. Third cinema, urban regeneration and heritage Shakespeare in Alex Cox's Revengers Tragedy 4. Early modern performance and digital media: remediation and the evolving archival canon 5. Bend it like Nagra: mainstreaming The Changeling in Sarah Harding's Compulsion Conclusion: early modern dramatists on twenty-first-century screens Appendix 1. Chronological list of surviving film adaptations Appendix 2. Annotated filmography: early modern drama on screen, 1926-2012.

Signs of the Times: Structures and signatures

This article explores different ways in which time structures and signatures can be figured both as a means of analysis and as a strategy for creation of performance work. It extends Anne Bogart's description of time signatures as understood within her system of Viewpoints training, specifically how different modalities of time combine in ways that uniquely identify each performance “in a similar way that the palm of every hand has a unique pattern of lines and creases”. Anne Ubersfeld's general observation regarding the lack of critical tools available for semiotic analysis of time compared with space is also discussed. How such time structures and schemas are actually signified to audiences then becomes the central question: each may involve varying levels of framing, foregrounding and bringing into view, with audiences sometimes consciously engaged with the playing out of these as a central thematic concern. The temporal devices and strategies that drive the generation of material may also be identified explicitly by the work as its defining ‘signature’. Noting how frequently a musical vocabulary asserts itself in this cross-disciplinary context, the article addresses examples such as Mike Figgis' ‘real-time’ film Timecode (2000), for which the shooting script was drafted on music paper to capture its four cameras over four staves on the model of a string quartet, as well as the theatre work of composer Mauricio Kagel – especially his dramatic text Sur Scène (1959) - alongside an exploration of “compositional linguistics”, the idea of “speech as music” and the temporal notation systems of Conversation Analysis. Through such examples, the article sketches the outlines of a semiotics of time in performance that may adequately describe the rich diversity of contemporary practices across disciplinary boundaries.

The Homme Fatal and the Subversion of Suspicion in <i>Mr Brooks</i> and <i>The Killer Inside Me</i>

The Homme Fatal and the Subversion of Suspicion in <i>Mr Brooks</i> and <i>The Killer Inside Me</i>

Isochrony and the Story/Discourse Distinction in Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark

Isochrony and the Story/Discourse Distinction in Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark Robert Efird (bio) In an uninterrupted ninety-minute shot Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) guides the viewer through nearly three hundred years of Russian history and several kilometers of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Assuming entirely the gaze of an unseen visitor, the camera passes through many of the galleries and halls of the massive building, pausing occasionally to inspect the exquisite details hidden among the collections or follow tsars and poets as they move through rooms and historical scenes that still resonate in the national consciousness. But here any linear chronological order between the various historical epochs is completely abolished. The film seems to move randomly through different time periods, and the distant past frequently mingles with the twenty first-century present. Astoundingly, all of this is accomplished without a single cut or deviation from the perspective of the invisible character watching the action unfold before him. Despite the obvious technical difficulties in achieving such a shot, none of the more than eight hundred actors featured in the film ever seem to miss their marks and the graceful, fluid motion of the camera never feels hurried or constrained. Opinions may vary on the artistic consistency or political stance of Russian Ark, but it is undoubtedly one of the boldest cinematic feats of the new century. The use of a single take or, more accurately, the illusion of a single take, is hardly new, though nothing on the scale of Russian Ark has ever [End Page 235] made it to the screen. Before the advent of digital video, which along with the stedicam provided the technological means for realizing Sokurov’s film, the unbroken narrative sequence had been explored earlier by Hitchcock in Rope, (1948) as well as in the experimental films of Michael Snow and Andy Warhol. More recently, Mike Figgis’ Timecode (2000) used four synchronized digital cameras to capture ninety-three continuous minutes from the intersecting lives of twenty-eight characters without a single break in the action or pause between scenes. While Sokurov’s use of the technology mirrors that of Figgis’ in the pursuit of an unbroken feature-length shot, there is a profound disparity in narrative subjectivity, one which in Russian Ark seems to dissolve the fundamental distinction between story and discourse, ultimately encroaching upon areas previously considered hypothetical in structuralist narratology. Unlike Timecode, which divides the screen into four separate perspectives on simultaneous events, Russian Ark is situated entirely within the viewpoint of a single lens, creating the illusion that all information on the screen is mediated by the consciousness of a single character. At first glance this situation may appear to be a textbook example of what Seymour Chatman describes as the perceptual filter, where the narrator manipulates the consciousness of a character to make it seem as if events are being related from within the world of the story (144). Chatman’s theory and terminology will be examined in more detail below but for a general description the term is particularly useful. It is through Sokurov’s character (and the filmmaker himself provides the voice-off when this visitor speaks) that everything we see on the screen passes, as the film makes clear in its first moments. Since the entirety of the film is done in a single shot, the traditional method of establishment through a point/glance shot is impossible and Sokurov is forced to explicitly state that the vision of the camera corresponds to that of the character.1 Following the sparse opening credits the screen sits in total darkness and the voice begins the film by saying “I open my eyes and see nothing.”—immediately establishing a link between the perspective of the speaker and that of the camera. As the first images appear he comments on the figures he sees before him, officers and ladies dressed in early nineteenth-century fashions, and marks his own movements as he follows them into the enormous Winter Palace. Though the motion suggests he is part of the diegetic world of the story, the figures he observes are unaware of his presence. In the last seconds of...

Shakespearean Heritage and the Preposterous “Contemporary Jacobean” Film: Mike Figgis’s <i>Hotel</i>

Mike Figgis’s Hotel (2001), which contains a film-within-the-film adaptation of John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi , is representative of an emerging corpus of screen versions of Jacobean drama that aggressively pitch themselves against the conservative nostalgia characteristic of mainstream screen Shakespeares. Hotel is deliberate in its use of anachronism, narrative disjunction, and irreverence toward its source text, troping the revival of Webster’s play as both cultural cannibalism and the production of an easily digestible “fast-food McMalfi.” The contemporary Jacobean aesthetic it espouses is preposterous, in George Puttenham’s terms, in its deliberate misplacing of temporal and spatial relationships to articulate transgressive female desire that challenges the structures of the film industry and early modern society alike. Tracing its descent from Derek Jarman’s queer Tempest (1971) and Edward II (1991) and setting itself against the Shakespeare heritage industry as represented by its immediate predecessor Shakespeare in Love (1999), Figgis’s Hotel employs digital technology, improvisation, and intertextual dialogue to challenge not only Shakespeare’s cultural hegemony, but also the domination of the heteronormative male gaze in conventional cinema. If Hotel is a film “about” how to produce a fast-food McMalfi for a contemporary audience, Figgis’s use of the preposterous contemporary Jacobean aesthetic makes The Duchess of Malfi “about” the making of Hotel and “about” man’s control of transgressive female sexuality in the medium of film.

Epic AIDS: Angels in America from stage to screen

Epic AIDS: Angels in America from stage to screen

Feelin' bad this morning: why the British blues?

This paper considers the Mike Figgis film Red, White & Blues as a history of blues music in Britain. The film was produced as part of a series celebrating the centenary of the blues, and not unnaturally its British focus begins with the 1950s and 1960s. The paper argues, however, that it is an incomplete history because it fails to consider how the British blues genre and scene developed subsequently. It also argues that the film focuses too much on the memories and performances of the musicians. It fails to consider the industrial context in which any ‘new’ genre can emerge, and pays almost no attention to the role of its consumers, the audiences and fans across the country that were an integral part of its development. The paper suggests that research into that aspect of the British blues scene would complement the various documentary accounts of the music and musicians.

Closely Watched Films: An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Technique

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Beginnings of Film Narrative: D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation 2. The Art of Montage: Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin 3. Expressionism and Realism in Film Form: F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh and Charles Chaplin's The Adventurer 4. The Conversion to Sound and the Classical Hollywood Film: Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday 5. Expressive Realism: Orson Welles's Citizen Kane 6. Italian Neorealism: Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief 7. Auteur Theory and the French New Wave: Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows 8. Hollywood Auteur: Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious 9. The European Art Film: Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 10. Film and Postmodernism: Woody Allen's Annie Hall 11. Political Cinema: Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing 12. Feminism and Film Form: Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing 13. Epilogue: Digital Video and New Forms of Narrative in Mike Figgis's Timecode Notes Glossary Bibliography Index

Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey (review)

Reviewed by: Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey Edward Komara Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey. Edited by Peter Guralnick, Robert Santelli, Holly George-Warren, and Christopher John Farley . New York: Amistad/ HarperCollins, 2003. [ 288p. ISBN 0-06-052544-4. $27.95.] Illustrations. One of the highlights of the fall 2003 Public Broadcasting Service television season was Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues (henceforth The Blues), a series of seven films broadcast on consecutive nights in late September. There had never been such an extensive television presentation of the blues, so the series was notable even to viewers familiar with this music. The group of films did not attempt to give a chronological account of the blues, perhaps partly due to the scarcity of film footage of blues shot before 1960, and perhaps also due to criticism of the 2000 Ken Burns series Jazz (see for example Steven F. Pond, "Jamming the Reception: Ken Burns, Jazz, and the Problem of 'America's Music'," Notes 60, no. 1 [September 2003]: 11-45). Rather, the director of each of The Blues films concentrated on one aspect of the music: Martin Scorsese on African antecedents of the blues; Charles Burnett on blues and its associations with social concepts of sin; Richard Pearce on the chitlin circuit blues in Memphis and north Mississippi; Wim Wenders on Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James, and J. B. Lenoir; Marc Levin on Chicago and Chess Records; Mike Figgis on the British blues scene of the 1960s; and Clint Eastwood on piano blues. Celebration, not documentation, appeared to be the mission, and on assuming that, I found each film at least watchable, a few enjoyable, and the Pearce, Wenders, and Figgis offerings the best. The occasion for producing the film series, its companion book, and other related materials is the Year of the Blues (YOTB) 2003, marking the centennial of the estimated year when "Father of the Blues" W. C. Handy heard a blues slide guitarist for the first time at a Tutwiler, Mississippi, railroad station. The Year of the Blues was declared by the 107th United States Congress on 1 August 2002, promoted by periodicals such as Living Blues and Blues Revue, and monitored by the Experience Music Project, Seattle, and the Blues Foundation, Memphis. Since its initial television broadcast, The Blues series has been available on DVD in longer edits than those originally aired (Sony Music Video 55808). The Experience Music Project (EMP) coordinated an educational outreach campaign with the series and prepared a teacher's guide with an illustrative compact disc, of which twenty-five thousand hard copies were distributed to American high schools; these materials are accessible electronically through the Web site http://www.pbs.org/theblues/classroom.html (accessed 20 May 2004). A set of soundtrack compact discs was issued by Universal Musical Enterprises and Sony/Columbia/Legacy, along with a historical compilation on five compact discs and a series of twelve compact discs, each presenting individual artists from Bessie Smith to Keb' Mo'. (For a complete bibliography and discography, see also http://www.theyearoftheblues.org [accessed 20 May 2004].) The companion book reflects the films. It is a sumptuously prepared volume that crisply reproduces vintage and contemporary photographs laid out on variously colored pages. When the closed square volume is opened, the resulting rectangle represents the letterbox-shaped format of the films, and the structure is based on the seven episodes, accompanied by a thirty-seven [End Page 104] page essay "A Century of the Blues" by Robert Santelli. The prose texts, some newly written for this volume, others selected, edited, and reprinted from classic writings, are broadly grouped according to the types of blues styles featured in each film. Like the film series as a whole, the book does not aim to give a chronological account of the blues; as the series editor Alex Gibney writes in the book's foreword (p. 9), "Neither [the films nor the book] intends to be the last word on the subject. Rather, they are 'first words,' agents provocateurs meant to stir audiences and readers to explore the emotional territory of the blues on their own." To give a variety of "first words...

The Sin of Knowledge: Ancient Themes and Modern Variations

Ziolkowski, Theodore. The Sin of Knowledge: Ancient Themes and Modem Variations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 210 pp. $32.95 hardcover. During his long and distinguished career, Theodore Ziolkowski has grappled with the problem of knowledge from multiple perspectives: as teacher imparting knowledge to students, scholar expanding knowledge of literary and cultural history, and university administrator faced with justifying the pursuit of knowledge to a sometimes skeptical American public. Well acquainted with knowledge as both blessing and curse, Ziolkowski now relates his life-long "meditations on the problematic relationship of society to knowledge, of civilization to sin and guilt, of the individual consciousness to conscience" (xv) in a book devoted to three persistent myths that hinge on the consequences of the human thirst for knowledge: Adam and the Fall, Prometheus, and Faust. With reference to Goethe's summary description of Faust-"diese sehr ernsten Scherze" -Ziolkowski calls his own study a "serious jeu d'esprit" (xiii). Given the complexity of these myths, not to mention the abundant literature surrounding each one of them, Ziolkowski stresses that his is a personal and necessarily selective rumination on the question why just these particular myths have continued to occupy Western minds for centuries up to and including our own. Scholarly and erudite in tone, the book sparkles with elegant turns of phrase and dry witticisms. It is by no means definitive, however, and experts on the evolution of any one of these myths will find glaring omissions of both primary and secondary texts. Faust scholars, for example, may be appalled to find a whole page on Randy Newman's rock musical Faust but no mention at all of Lessing's seminal Faust fragment; students of Prometheus will encounter only fleeting mention of Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" but learn much about a largely unknown East German writer by the name of Gunther Ricker. As for the Biblical story of the Fall, the juxtaposition in the book of a photograph of Adam and Eve on a Fourth Century Roman sarcophagus with one from Mike Figgis's titillating film, The Loss of Sexual Innocence, which Ziolkowski thankfully mentions only in passing, may well raise some scholarly eyebrows. Ziolkowski picks and chooses modern reworkings of the three myths to bolster his thesis that "[at] different stages in its development the same society can see itself as Adamic, Promethean, or Faustian" (190-91). In part one of the study he analyses the origin of each of the myths in order to expose the underlying similarity "that myths concerned with the sin of knowledge typically emerge during periods of social crisis produced by the tension between conflicting sets of values and beliefs" (69). In each myth the hero violates a divine prohibition against new knoweldge, and in each the mythic figure undergoes the transformation (Ziolkowski actually calls it "morphing") from "trickster" to tragic hero to scapegoat. Following a transition chapter, "From Myth to Modernity," part two of the book proceeds to illustrate how the "modifications of the myth . …

Digital Transformations

Digital Transformations

Postmodern Cinema and Hollywood Culture in an Age of Corporate Colonization

Postmodern cinema has emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as a powerfully creative force in Hollywood filmmaking, reflecting and helping to shape the historic convergence of media culture, technology, and consumerism. It corresponds to the post-Fordist, globalized phase of capitalist development typified by increasing class polarization, social atomization, urban chaos and violence, ecological crisis, and mass depoliticization. Departing from the modernist cultural tradition grounded in the Enlightenment, norms of industrial society, and faith in historical progress, postmodern cinema is characterized by disjointed narratives, a dark view of the human condition, images of chaos and random violence, death of the hero, emphasis on technique over content, and dystopic views of the future. While postmodern directors such as Woody Allen, Oliver Stone, Robert Altman, Quentin Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, Mike Figgis, and John Waters produce films that are often highly original and even subversive, their departure from conventional Hollywood formulas and motifs that define the studio system - their pronounced cultural radicalism - is rarely associated with any sort of political radicalism even where a harsh social critique might be visible. Postmodern cinema helps reproduce the very popular mood of anxiety, uncertainty, fear, and cynicism that it mirrors in the general society.

Mike Figgis's Time Code

Mike Figgis's <i>Time Code</i>

Review: Leaving Las Vegas by Mike Figgis, Lila Cazès, Annie Stewart

Book Review| July 01 1996 Review: Leaving Las Vegas by Mike Figgis, Lila Cazès, Annie Stewart Leaving Las VegasMike FiggisLila CazèsAnnie Stewart Albert Johnson Albert Johnson Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (1996) 49 (4): 38–40. https://doi.org/10.2307/1213557 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Albert Johnson; Review: Leaving Las Vegas by Mike Figgis, Lila Cazès, Annie Stewart. Film Quarterly 1 July 1996; 49 (4): 38–40. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/1213557 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1996 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.